Tools of the Trade

I’ve been into Victoria to buy supplies to start my bed panel project. It was another great learning experience at Glass-Smith — this time about iridescent glass & lead came widths. I got lots of glass & a couple new ‘tools of the trade’. At $8 for the lead dykes & $24 for the large square, the tools were cheaper than I thought they’d be.

I’m real excited to have a proper ruler for measuring & cutting — it’s got a groove along the bottom edge to hold it against the glass. I got the bigger one because it’s long end is 2′ & it has a cross-bar for better stability & will work great for some angle cuts.

It always amazes me how simple a job can be with the proper tool — once I learned to use a screwdriver instead of a knife, hee hee, I haven’t looked back. I remember the hassle of enlarging patterns by hand — I even have a fancy little gizmo with arms to help but it can be quite difficult when making large window patterns. And I still had to trace out another copy — high potential for inaccuracies.

Now, I have a wonderful Mac laptop & Photoshop software — what a breeze making patterns any size I want. And I can work out the colour scheme with the glass I have in stock. And I can print out as many exact copies as I want.

I went back & got the horseshoe nails [yup, that’s what we use to keep the lead in place as we assemble the glass pieces] I forgot so I’m all set to start my next lead window project. I need to clean off my workbench to make room for this larger project. Since I’m making two panels, each the same, I’m thinking of assembling them at the same time — but do I have enough room to do that? Hmmm, have to do some measuring.

First, I need to get some pics of the glass [all those beautiful colours & patterns!] to use them to finish the bed panel pattern. Can’t start cutting glass without it. Oooo, gotta hurry — I can’t wait to use my new tools.